DARTMOUTH — He wasn't there to entertain and he wasn't there to make them laugh.

MATT CAMARA

DARTMOUTH — He wasn't there to entertain and he wasn't there to make them laugh.

"I'm not Chris Rock. ... I intend to say some things that will certainly incite, if nothing else, conversation," said controversial author and political activist Euware X. Osayande before launching into a lecture Thursday against what he called cultural imperialism in America at UMass Dartmouth's Frederick Douglass Unity House.

The lecture, followed by a poetry reading at the Star Store campus in New Bedford, was organized by the African and African-American Studies Department, Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality and other campus groups.

The award-winning poet drew on historical examples from 1840 as much as from 2012 to make his case that racial equality in America has stalled for decades, then wasted no time tearing into Republicans and corporations.

He reserved a half hour of his talk for the record companies, which he said peddle a "black culture that no longer belongs to African-Americans," all of which keeps people of color from being politically engaged.